Originating at Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art, A Site of Struggle: American Art against Anti-Black Violence explores how artists have engaged with the reality of anti-Black violence and its accompanying challenges of representation in the United States over a 100 + year period. In conjunction with this exhibition, a national group of curators, educators, and scholars convened […]
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The NAACP’s 1935 exhibition, “An Art Commentary on Lynching,” and its use in anti-lynching activism represents a critical but often overlooked moment in American art history. In March 2022, The Block Museum hosted a special conversation about this historical exhibition, the intersection of art and activism, and connections to A Site of Struggle and our community today. […]
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How has art been used to protest, process, mourn, and memorialize anti-Black violence within the United States? Originating at Northwestern’s Block Museum of Art, the exhbition A Site of Struggle explores how artists have engaged with the reality of anti-Black violence and its accompanying challenges of representation in the United States over a 100+ year period. The […]
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The multidimensional work of artist Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) employs video, photography, music, and poetry as different pathways approaching Indigenous experience. In his two-channel video installation, Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer (2019) – on view in Fall 2021 alongside Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts: Thinking about History with The Block’s Collection – image, sound, and text […]
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As part of the Block Museum’s Student Acquisition initiative, Northwestern students in the 2020-2021 Block Museum Student Associates program selected artist Leonard Suryajaya’s Quarantine Blues (2020) for the museum’s collection. Suryajaya’s work explores complex intersections of intimacy, community and family, and how the “everyday is layered with histories, meanings, and potential.” In October 2021, Suryajaya joined the […]
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Who gets in? Who decides? In recent years, questions about accessibility, representation, and inclusion have become central to an ongoing reexamination of the collecting practices and power structures of museums and the art world. Artists, curators, writers, and activists have emphasized the narrow framework of Western art history—a discipline dominated by white Euro-American institutions and […]
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Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts: Thinking about History with The Block’s Collection considers our constantly changing understanding of the past through the lens of artistic practice. On September 29, 2021 the Block Museum hosed a keynote conversation with exhibition artists Andrea Carlson, Tonika Lewis Johnson, and Chris Pappan who discussed how artists, artworks, and museums shape and challenge […]
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Murry DePillars was a Chicago artist prominent in the city’s Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and the artist organization AfriCobra. Enrique Chagoya is a California-based artist raised in Mexico City who addresses in both artwork and activism the cultural and political clash between the U.S. and Latin America and U.S. foreign policy. Though to […]
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In Winter 2021 The Block was honored to present Voices Across Time: Sharing Women’s Experiences of Re-entry, a special program bringing together organizers from Beyondmedia Education with current and former members of Grace House, a residential program for women exiting the Illinois prison system. This screening and discussion centered on women’s experiences of re-entry after […]
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Throughout Fall 2020 the Block Museum welcomed online audiences to a special series of shared conversations, focusing on artworks from the collection that explore ideas of justice, race, and equity. [View our Just Mercy Project] These discussion-based lunchtime tours were led by Block staff and inspired by Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and […]
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